[Thunderbird]

I sure hope this is possible...

I have an IDE hard drive that has been formatted for Windows NT (it is from my Pee Cee at work.) The drive died today (bad blocks, I suppose.) It will not boot, instead it gives an error message that no operating system was found. My IT people tell me that they cannot recover anything off of the drive (they didn't try), which I find hard to believe. I have had drives go bad before, and usually I have been able to recover most of my data.

I want to take the drive home and put it in my G4 to see if I can recover a few documents from it. My question is... will it mount? Can I put a PC formatted hard drive in a Mac and have it recognized? Does PC Exchange work the same for hard disks as it does for floppies? What is my best course of action for recovering data from this disk?

[Thunderbird]

Another note... I have Virtual PC 4.0 and Norton Utilites (Mac version, not PC). Will I be able to use either of those programs to check the drive? What about OS X? I don't know UNIX very well, but will the command line be of any help?

[Franck]

Your drive is NTFS-formatted, since it comes from a Win NT machine, and this is a big promblem for Mac compatibility. AFAIK, a Mac could read FAT-formatted disks, but not NTFS ones.

Do you have a NT boot disk ? ( a Win98 boot disk may work too)
If so, you should restart your PC with your boot-disk and try
scandisk
or
chkdsk /f

If your drive isn't damaged beyond repair, this should rescue it.

If you don't have a valid bootable diskette, try mounting your drive on another PC as a slave drive ( removing the CD-ROM if necessary ) , in order to run some disk tools ( Norton Utilities for PC are available as trialware on the web ).
I had the same problem last month, and my IT people gave me the same answer: We have to format the drive and ghost a standard config. ( and no, they didn't try either)

FYI, VPC can't use a whole drive, it let me only select a VPC drive-file.

Hope this helps.